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ePaper created 2014-09-15, 12:31:02 | version 1.32.01
Petrus Camper Petrus Camper (1722-1789) was a Dutch physician and anthropologist born in Leiden. He studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Leiden and was appointed professor first in Franeker and subsequently in Amsterdam and Groningen. His contribution to dermatology is mainly related to his view on human pigmentation. His significance to this area is best understood when placed in the context of the work of other Dutch scientists from that period. From the European perspective, black skin was evidently different from white skin and merited investigation. Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731), an anatomist from Amsterdam and a pioneer in techniques of preserving organs and tissue, described two black African foetuses in his ‘Thesaurus Anatomicus’ (1716). Some 20 years later, Bernard Siegfried Albinus (1697-1770) a student of Boerhaave from Leiden, was the first to publish in a scientific paper (1737) an illustration of the dissected skin of a black subject. It was Petrus Camper who described the location of the human skin pigment during his inaugural lecture ‘On the Origin and Colour of Blacks’, on 14 November 1764 in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre of the University of Groningen. He showed that the skin (dermis), whether of a black or a white person, is white and that the second or middle layer, which is called the reticulum, can be black, brown, red-copperish or tanned, depending on the skin type. He further demonstrated that this layer does not contain blood vessels, and that the upper layer, the so-called cuticula, is transparent, so that it appears more or less coloured by the underlying layer.[6] 13 BWEADVSMGFINCORR:Opmaak 1 21-07-2014 17:39 Pagina 13